Hackers using their skills to get jobs is old news. My university had an unspoken policy of hiring students who broke into the servers as admins (with job one being "fix the hole you used"). Hell, isn't this the plot of Sneakers?:)
Just a state may place limits on buying alcohol, pornography and cigarettes, I see no reason why a state may not place age restrictions on video games.
My first reason would be - because it doesn't seem to stop kids from getting their hands on it anyway. And oddly enough, the most common place for kids to sneak out booze/porn/ciggies from is... from their parents.;)
You are right. But that's the parent's responsibility. If you call buying something "free speech", then you strip that right away from parents.
I can't say I'm following you. The ruling says that the government can't unilaterally decide that kids can't buy these video games. Says nothing about parents telling kids not to buy them (or even the stores refusing to sell them, a la movie ratings). What rights are being stripped from parents?
And seeing Thomas dissent ("kids don't have rights") makes me very glad I'm safely up here in Canada. I would love someone to get him in front of a camera and ask him exactly what rights he believes youth aren't entitled to.
Just a state may place limits on buying alcohol, pornography and cigarettes, I see no reason why a state may not place age restrictions on video games.
My first reason would be - because it doesn't seem to stop kids from getting their hands on it anyway. And oddly enough, the most common place for kids to sneak out booze/porn/ciggies from is... from their parents.;)
If I make a deal to stock only Coke products in my grocery store I'd expect a cheaper price from Coke too. Yawn.. you anti-ms trolls are really funny..
You'd be disappointed - Coke generally pays off their folks directly rather than with cheaper prices. (And in universities, they'll put the payoff under NDA so the school's can't compare).
Also, there's a difference between "if you go exclusive with me I'll cut you a deal" and "you'll go exclusive with me or else I'll screw you".
No one was forced to use Microsoft but their product was so common that the judge determined that them encouraging customers to use another one of their products was illegal. I guess the call here is determining if Google is a monopoly on the search business.
Strictly speaking, Microsoft didn't get in trouble for "encouraging" - they got in trouble for *assuming* that if you were using Windows, you Obviously wanted Explorer, and then integrated it so you couldn't get rid of it.
Contrast with Google: signing up for one service doesn't automatically sign you up for others (I have Gmail, but not Offers - I don't think I've even heard about it in any detail via Google). It's relatively simple to stop using any (or all) of Google's products at any time.
Now, if Groupon was getting filed under spam, this guy might have a point. If you click "not important" and Google kept putting it in the priority file, they might have a point. If they click "important" on Groupon's mails and they don't promote to priority, they might have a point. But they didn't do any of that.
For starters, by removing the accounting tricks that let a company say "I'm here in America, but all those folks over there are the same company so I don't have to pay taxes to bring their product over here. But if you're talking about income, no, we don't make that money here.
Hollywood accounting, to put it simply.
The "loopholes" you refer to are bits of freedom in a less-free general environment.. So, it looks like you you want to remove the bits of freedom.
I wouldn't call the ability to make billions while claiming to lose money (and taking the tax credits from that) "freedom". Accounting tricks are not freedom.
If that's all that awaits them, the state shouldn't be releasing them (it's cruel to the prisoners and endangers the public).
It's also hypocritical - either the Criminal is safe to be around the public or she's not. If she's safe, then why are we continuing to punish them after their sentence is over. If she's not, why is she out in the first place?
Right, then they'll just move the company offshore, or we'll be swallowed alive by other countries services that are much much cheaper. That's a really nice way of fixing the problem.
Kind of doubt that - otherwise it would have happened already. If a company is going to have a presence in-country, there's a certain amount of infrastructure that has to be "on the ground".
I understand your feelings. At the same time it sounds like someone learning chord progressions on the guitar and wondering how it was applicable to playing Led Zeppelin songs.
That's a decent comparison, except that the gulf between "school coding" and "what my console game does" gets wider every year. It's a lot harder to teach basic principles *and* generate something actually useful early on. (Most of the modern solutions seem to involve black-boxing implementation into easy function calls.) Definitely not my old Vic-20 days where a text game *was* state of the art.:)
If anything, I'd be tempted to teach critical thinking and logic, and break out the old Logo robot. (Hell, those things should be cheap enough now that every student can have one - Roborally in class!)
Johnny can't code because his Java education hid what's going on under the hood, such that when he goes to write something more complex than "Hello World", he doesn't really understand why his Java app is (effectively) leaking memory, his pointers... sorry, references get all bungled, etc.... That and when he hits corporate land, he's graded on his reports, not his code, so he never gets the correct mentoring.
Well, let's be fair - for the vast majority of Business Logic software there isn't a big push for performance "under the hood". If it provides correct input in a reasonable amount of time (which can be defined as simply as "it's faster than it would be to do by hand"), that's pretty much a "win" to them. (Obviously the benchmarks are a bit more severe when you start talking back-end.)
As an example: my day job is largely building tools for management types to retrieve, display, and manipulate data. It's almost entirely VBA in Excel, because what my end-users want is a "smart spreadsheet". They open Excel, fill in some cells, push the button, and Automagically Stuff Happens.
Is my code all that and a bag of chips? No. But most days, something Good Enough Now trumps Something Perfect Later.
Middle school and high school students haven't had to fret about offshoring, I doubt that's a factor...
It's still a factor, high school students are going to be concerned about what college to attend and their future employment. Middle school students, not so much, but at that point in their lives the children's parents will influence what happens. And parents will see offshoring as a threat.
Not to mention that even as early as the mid-late 90s, the Common Wisdom was that if you weren't working in The Tech, you were going to be relegated to second-class status. (Of course, the opposite happened, since it turns out knowledge of HTML doesn't get your toilet unplugged, but I digress). Schools get pressure (yes, even as early as middle school/junior high) from parents, industry, and politicians to teach The Skills That Tomorrow's Workers Will Need. Which is bull, since not only no-one can guess what today's 13-year-old will be working at in 5-10 years, but if you push *everyone* into the hot new job, you're guaranteeing a glut and crash at the other end.
So tell me how you "kill" offshoring? I'm curious what you magic antidote is to prevent companies from operating in a cost-efficient manner.
Easy - remove the loopholes that make it cost-efficient for companies to offshore.
This doesn't mean protectionism - just closing the rules that allow companies to shift their revenues and losses between tax districts will do wonders to encourage companies to work in house.
The company that builds a better pair of glasses will get my business the moment "cash on hand" meets "price".
I've been wearing glasses my whole life, and it annoys me that it's nigh-impossible to get a pair that does anything more than just "fix my eyes". Give me something that records video and audio. Maybe some binocular capability. I'd say throw video on there, except we haven't solved the "fry your eyeball" problem there.
We keep seeing these articles that say "all privacy is gone" but the truth is the privacy was never there.
More properly, all the pieces were always there, but it was too expensive and time-consuming to connect them all. (Heck, what do you think police and private investigators do?). Computers have made it cost-effective to track everything about everyone (even if you don't really care about it), because some day you might need to know how many people with 5s in their telephone number also eat sushi take-out on Wednesdays.
Is it only because corps want it to die and not because we're hitting the tipping point where enough people are behaving irresponsibly and causing enough trouble for everyone else that they're willing to forgo some anonymity to get things back to a workable state? (in before Ben Franklin quote).
Resource abused, community responds, film at 11.
I'd chalk it up to a few things:
It's becoming far easier to connect all the dots of a person's life, with trivial effort. Worse, for convenience we encourage people to make those connections for us - not just "who's your friend on Facebook", but "sign in with your Facebook/Twitter/Google account".
That sort of marketing data is gold to corporations, so they have zero interest in protecting your privacy any more than they absolutely have to. Why does the grocery store give you a discount or air miles with the "club card"? Because it lets them track your sales preferences.
Not only does the public generally not care about privacy, they tend to actively subvert others - for instance, the "kissing couple". There was no pressing reason that these two people needed to be publicly identified.
The "tag the rioters" push in Vancouver is actually pretty funny - I'm waiting for people to start photoshopping their favorite politicians into those photos and tagging them as rioters. (I'd be surprised if anyone is actually found guilty in court via Facebook - how do you even prove the photo was taken where they say it was?)
The comparison between a modern hospital room and a hotel is absurd.
Not necessarily - he specified a "recovery room", which is pretty much a bed, a TV, and a nurse to check on you every few hours. I wouldn't be surprised if for low-risk surgeries it was cheaper to get a decent hotel room and pay a nurse to stop by twice a day.
Think of food, housing, clothes, everything you need to live. Don't you have to pay for those? Then why should someone else pay for your health care?
Personal answer: for the same reason the government pays for roads, schools, police, and parks - because healthcare is a communal problem that can be solved more inexpensively and effectively as a group, rather than making everyone buy their own.
Slashdot Mirror
The OS trusts the people, the people ARE the weak link no matter how much you want to spin it.
True, to a point. The problem is, if you have a USB key, there's no way to find out what's on it without plugging it in. Curiousity does the rest.
Hackers using their skills to get jobs is old news. My university had an unspoken policy of hiring students who broke into the servers as admins (with job one being "fix the hole you used"). Hell, isn't this the plot of Sneakers? :)
I'm immune to your silly Sony mind tricks!
Heaven forbid that the Americans visit and spend money in your economy.
Unfortunately, we find that by the time your DHS folks get through with you, you're feeling a bit too... tender... to really relax.
Plays merry hell with our tourism.
(Personally, I've never had a problem using a Canadian card stateside. The fees are a bit outrageous, but both debit and credit worked fine.)
Just a state may place limits on buying alcohol, pornography and cigarettes, I see no reason why a state may not place age restrictions on video games.
My first reason would be - because it doesn't seem to stop kids from getting their hands on it anyway. And oddly enough, the most common place for kids to sneak out booze/porn/ciggies from is... from their parents. ;)
You are right. But that's the parent's responsibility. If you call buying something "free speech", then you strip that right away from parents.
I can't say I'm following you. The ruling says that the government can't unilaterally decide that kids can't buy these video games. Says nothing about parents telling kids not to buy them (or even the stores refusing to sell them, a la movie ratings). What rights are being stripped from parents?
And seeing Thomas dissent ("kids don't have rights") makes me very glad I'm safely up here in Canada. I would love someone to get him in front of a camera and ask him exactly what rights he believes youth aren't entitled to.
google gives you a free email account, then uses it to market stuff to you when you request it
FTFY: If you don't sign up for Google Offers, you don't get those emails in Gmail.
Just a state may place limits on buying alcohol, pornography and cigarettes, I see no reason why a state may not place age restrictions on video games.
My first reason would be - because it doesn't seem to stop kids from getting their hands on it anyway. And oddly enough, the most common place for kids to sneak out booze/porn/ciggies from is... from their parents. ;)
If I make a deal to stock only Coke products in my grocery store I'd expect a cheaper price from Coke too. Yawn.. you anti-ms trolls are really funny..
You'd be disappointed - Coke generally pays off their folks directly rather than with cheaper prices. (And in universities, they'll put the payoff under NDA so the school's can't compare).
Also, there's a difference between "if you go exclusive with me I'll cut you a deal" and "you'll go exclusive with me or else I'll screw you".
No one was forced to use Microsoft but their product was so common that the judge determined that them encouraging customers to use another one of their products was illegal. I guess the call here is determining if Google is a monopoly on the search business.
Strictly speaking, Microsoft didn't get in trouble for "encouraging" - they got in trouble for *assuming* that if you were using Windows, you Obviously wanted Explorer, and then integrated it so you couldn't get rid of it.
Contrast with Google: signing up for one service doesn't automatically sign you up for others (I have Gmail, but not Offers - I don't think I've even heard about it in any detail via Google). It's relatively simple to stop using any (or all) of Google's products at any time.
Now, if Groupon was getting filed under spam, this guy might have a point. If you click "not important" and Google kept putting it in the priority file, they might have a point. If they click "important" on Groupon's mails and they don't promote to priority, they might have a point. But they didn't do any of that.
For starters, by removing the accounting tricks that let a company say "I'm here in America, but all those folks over there are the same company so I don't have to pay taxes to bring their product over here. But if you're talking about income, no, we don't make that money here. Hollywood accounting, to put it simply.
The "loopholes" you refer to are bits of freedom in a less-free general environment.. So, it looks like you you want to remove the bits of freedom.
I wouldn't call the ability to make billions while claiming to lose money (and taking the tax credits from that) "freedom". Accounting tricks are not freedom.
If that's all that awaits them, the state shouldn't be releasing them (it's cruel to the prisoners and endangers the public).
It's also hypocritical - either the Criminal is safe to be around the public or she's not. If she's safe, then why are we continuing to punish them after their sentence is over. If she's not, why is she out in the first place?
Right, then they'll just move the company offshore, or we'll be swallowed alive by other countries services that are much much cheaper. That's a really nice way of fixing the problem.
Kind of doubt that - otherwise it would have happened already. If a company is going to have a presence in-country, there's a certain amount of infrastructure that has to be "on the ground".
Pascal or Modula 2 is probably better since it does not learn you things you must unlearn later.
Please not Modula 2. That's what I took, and while it's OK for teaching, it's completely dead weight in the marketplace.
I understand your feelings. At the same time it sounds like someone learning chord progressions on the guitar and wondering how it was applicable to playing Led Zeppelin songs.
That's a decent comparison, except that the gulf between "school coding" and "what my console game does" gets wider every year. It's a lot harder to teach basic principles *and* generate something actually useful early on. (Most of the modern solutions seem to involve black-boxing implementation into easy function calls.) Definitely not my old Vic-20 days where a text game *was* state of the art. :)
If anything, I'd be tempted to teach critical thinking and logic, and break out the old Logo robot. (Hell, those things should be cheap enough now that every student can have one - Roborally in class!)
Johnny can't code because his Java education hid what's going on under the hood, such that when he goes to write something more complex than "Hello World", he doesn't really understand why his Java app is (effectively) leaking memory, his pointers... sorry, references get all bungled, etc.... That and when he hits corporate land, he's graded on his reports, not his code, so he never gets the correct mentoring.
Well, let's be fair - for the vast majority of Business Logic software there isn't a big push for performance "under the hood". If it provides correct input in a reasonable amount of time (which can be defined as simply as "it's faster than it would be to do by hand"), that's pretty much a "win" to them. (Obviously the benchmarks are a bit more severe when you start talking back-end.)
As an example: my day job is largely building tools for management types to retrieve, display, and manipulate data. It's almost entirely VBA in Excel, because what my end-users want is a "smart spreadsheet". They open Excel, fill in some cells, push the button, and Automagically Stuff Happens.
Is my code all that and a bag of chips? No. But most days, something Good Enough Now trumps Something Perfect Later.
Middle school and high school students haven't had to fret about offshoring, I doubt that's a factor...
It's still a factor, high school students are going to be concerned about what college to attend and their future employment. Middle school students, not so much, but at that point in their lives the children's parents will influence what happens. And parents will see offshoring as a threat.
Not to mention that even as early as the mid-late 90s, the Common Wisdom was that if you weren't working in The Tech, you were going to be relegated to second-class status. (Of course, the opposite happened, since it turns out knowledge of HTML doesn't get your toilet unplugged, but I digress). Schools get pressure (yes, even as early as middle school/junior high) from parents, industry, and politicians to teach The Skills That Tomorrow's Workers Will Need. Which is bull, since not only no-one can guess what today's 13-year-old will be working at in 5-10 years, but if you push *everyone* into the hot new job, you're guaranteeing a glut and crash at the other end.
So tell me how you "kill" offshoring? I'm curious what you magic antidote is to prevent companies from operating in a cost-efficient manner.
Easy - remove the loopholes that make it cost-efficient for companies to offshore.
This doesn't mean protectionism - just closing the rules that allow companies to shift their revenues and losses between tax districts will do wonders to encourage companies to work in house.
The company that builds a better pair of glasses will get my business the moment "cash on hand" meets "price".
I've been wearing glasses my whole life, and it annoys me that it's nigh-impossible to get a pair that does anything more than just "fix my eyes". Give me something that records video and audio. Maybe some binocular capability. I'd say throw video on there, except we haven't solved the "fry your eyeball" problem there.
Good grief, what ever happened to "keeping an eye on your child"?
We keep seeing these articles that say "all privacy is gone" but the truth is the privacy was never there.
More properly, all the pieces were always there, but it was too expensive and time-consuming to connect them all. (Heck, what do you think police and private investigators do?). Computers have made it cost-effective to track everything about everyone (even if you don't really care about it), because some day you might need to know how many people with 5s in their telephone number also eat sushi take-out on Wednesdays.
Or better yet, train their employees to realize that just because someone knows where you work, doesn't mean they're who they claim to be.
Hell, what happened to the rule of thumb that you never give this sort of detail to people who call you, only to people you call?
Is it only because corps want it to die and not because we're hitting the tipping point where enough people are behaving irresponsibly and causing enough trouble for everyone else that they're willing to forgo some anonymity to get things back to a workable state? (in before Ben Franklin quote).
Resource abused, community responds, film at 11.
I'd chalk it up to a few things:
The "tag the rioters" push in Vancouver is actually pretty funny - I'm waiting for people to start photoshopping their favorite politicians into those photos and tagging them as rioters. (I'd be surprised if anyone is actually found guilty in court via Facebook - how do you even prove the photo was taken where they say it was?)
You would die in a 5 star hotel.
The comparison between a modern hospital room and a hotel is absurd.
Not necessarily - he specified a "recovery room", which is pretty much a bed, a TV, and a nurse to check on you every few hours. I wouldn't be surprised if for low-risk surgeries it was cheaper to get a decent hotel room and pay a nurse to stop by twice a day.
Think of food, housing, clothes, everything you need to live. Don't you have to pay for those? Then why should someone else pay for your health care?
Personal answer: for the same reason the government pays for roads, schools, police, and parks - because healthcare is a communal problem that can be solved more inexpensively and effectively as a group, rather than making everyone buy their own.